The wild becoming of childhood : writing as monument in Nina Bouraoui's Sauvage.

This article explores the writing of childhood in Sauvage (2011) by the contemporary francophone writer Nina Bouraoui, a text that narrates the experiences of fourteen-year-old Alya in Algeria as she struggles to comprehend the disappearance of her friend, Sami. The article analyses the depiction of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Forum for Modern Language Studies
Main Author: Damlé, Amaleena
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Oxford University Press 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dro.dur.ac.uk/32067/
http://dro.dur.ac.uk/32067/1/32067.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqs069
Description
Summary:This article explores the writing of childhood in Sauvage (2011) by the contemporary francophone writer Nina Bouraoui, a text that narrates the experiences of fourteen-year-old Alya in Algeria as she struggles to comprehend the disappearance of her friend, Sami. The article analyses the depiction of childhood in the text as a state of unbounded wildness, interpreting this wildness as a kind of ‘becoming’, as understood by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It further draws on the work of these thinkers in examining the relationship between childhood memories and writing in the text, in which temporality is dislocated and the past is enfolded into the present, creating a kind of ‘monument’ to childhood.